


sometimes the beast eats you

by lonelyghosts



Category: Homestuck, The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Angst, Body Horror, Canon-Typical Violence, Fear Avatars, Gen, Mild Gore, Past Abuse, Trans Female John Egbert, general unhappiness, theyre like all trans but yes june is in this
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-05
Updated: 2020-02-05
Packaged: 2021-02-27 12:53:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,172
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22337359
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lonelyghosts/pseuds/lonelyghosts
Summary: They became something beyond themselves a long time ago.
Comments: 12
Kudos: 43





	sometimes the beast eats you

**Author's Note:**

> this is a no sburb/sgrub AU for everyone, exploring what it would be like if the main characters of homestuck became fear avatars. its angsty, it mentions very bad stuff, it is unhappy, and it was very fun to write!
> 
> canon-typical warnings for both the magnus archives and homestuck!

**i. the sky will not be kind**

June Egbert used to feel so big, stuck in a tiny town far away from her friends and only her dad still there. She wanted to fly to them, to take each of her friends into her arms and save them. Her world was so small then, and she felt like the biggest thing in the world. 

All her friends kept falling, kept coming back different and hurting and she couldn't fix it. 

June Egbert is so, so small. 

Now she has lightning that patterns her skin like scars, blue and white crackling up her arms and neck and touching the corners of her too-blue eyes. She smells of the sweet hot pungent burn of ozone, and it reminds her of weeks spent treading the water in swimming pools. There is always a wind buffeting her hair. 

The world is so big. And she is so, so small. She hates herself for wanting to feel big again, for wanting to matter. Someday, she thinks, the world might become so big that it swallows her up. And then, maybe, it won't hurt anymore.

**ii. burned, about to burn, still on fire**

Rose Lalonde was a good girl before she wasn't.

She used to be prim, proper, all enunciated words and skirts and small, private secret smiles. She used to live in a big big house with a mother who said many words slurred together and every day her words got crisper and crisper.

She loved her mother. She did. She loved her mother, and it hurt so much, and she lost everything in one fell swoop.

Rose Lalonde stood over her mother's bloody corpse and thought of fire, of blood, of the salted fields of Carthage. She had never been a good girl, not really. She learned how to pretend, but her teeth had always been sharp. 

Her heart is filled with hate and with love. She has blood in her mouth and matches in her hands. She strikes one, and watches the world go up in flames.

She hates. She hates. She hates that she hates, she hates that she hates that she hates. Her whole body is burning with something and she can't figure it out, and she wants answers, and the only thing that offers relief is the high and jumping flames. The ash coats her mouth and settles in her lungs, and there is still no relief. 

These days, Rose Lalonde has blood and fire on her hands. Her hair and her skin is charcoal-stained, her eyes trailing purple fire. Smoke drifts from her lips in long, unhurried breaths, and she never touches a cigarette. Whiskey burns going down her throat, but it never burns enough. The hurting feels good, but never good enough. 

None of it will ever be enough.

**iii. there is something under the floorboards**

Dave Strider talks a lot and he leans on the walls, pushes his whole body up against them as if- if he pushes hard enough he can break out. He is afraid of the silence, the small spaces, of being crowded up against the corners and trapped. Blood pushing up against his skin and leaving bruises.

He was torn apart once, twice, a hundred thousand times before the age of thirteen. The apartment in which he grew up was small and full of sharp things, and there was no way to avoid the bleeding. He made himself as small as he possibly could, and then he made himself smaller. It did not save him.

Now he smells of the soft wet dampness of rotting coffins, his hair matted with burial dirt.

He wraps his arms around his body and holds himself, holds himself so tightly that nothing can hurt him again. His neck is always going to be stained with red, dripping down his collarbone and staining his shirt. 

His hands are full of wood splinters and there is dirt underneath his nails that will never quite come out. His skin is so, so cold. He says he came back from the grave wrong.

He says he didn't think dying would hurt so much, and fiddles with his sleeve. He doesn't say: it would have been better to stay dead. 

**iv. hollow remnants of what could have been**

There was nothing anyone could have done to save Jade Harley, not really. 

She used to dream of being enough to be useful. Her whole life she was alone, stuffed corpses in the hallways, her home a pharaoh's tomb. She wanted to be loved, more than anything; to be cherished, to be useful, to have someone who would be there for her at the end of the day.

But space and time are not kind, and they are not fair. She gives so much- too much- and it is not enough. At the end of the day Jade Harley is alone.

They could have saved her. They could have. If they had been there sooner, had been more reassuring, had seen the signs earlier- but no. When Jade Harley's best friends come for her, there isn't much left that they can save.

Her body fades in and out, these days, wreathed in foglike tendrils that curl around her, giving the only comfort that she can feel anymore. When she speaks- which is not often, these days- her voice echoes as if from very very far away. Her eyes are empty.

It felt so good, to let it all go. To leave behind all the love that kept her hurting, to shrug it off like an old coat and shed the love that kept her warm on the coldest nights before, until it lies behind her, discarded like a snake's shed skin.

She hurt so much, before. Now she is just numb.

It doesn't matter anymore, she tells the others. Her heart feels empty and light, and she knows once upon a time this used to be important. Once, she would have given anything for this reunion. Once, she would have been happy. But-

Well. Like she said. It doesn't matter anymore.

**v. and i want to never be lonely**

Jane Crocker is not lonely anymore.

The sweet hum of red warmth on her skull is reminder enough of that. She touches it, every so often, adjusts its position on her head for optimum efficiency. It says things, sometimes; sweet candy reminders that humanity is suffering.

Jane Crocker is not human anymore.

Humanity was never going to be hers for long, not for poor dear Janey. A great-grandmother had known that she was only a tool. Betty held Jane down and said, this whale probubbly hurt, gill, and then she opened Jane up and replaced most of her with metal and humming red until she had almost none of herself left except for the pain and the hurting.

Now she knows what her purpose is: to remake the world.

There is going to be a reckoning for her great-grandmother. There is nothing much that can kill her, but Jane is patient. Her sisters in the corners of the web tell her things, about what it means to hurt while still plastic and metal, and she knows that someday they will all join her.

She is not lonely. She is not human. Someday, her sisters will help her end the world, and then she can rest. 

**vi. starts so soft and sweet, turns them to hunters**

Jake English was a boy once upon a time.

Now he is more dark and dangerous, more alike to the things that run across his island and howl at night than to any human being. His grandmother taught him to hold flintlocks as a child and said, you can never trust anyone but yourself to keep you safe, and he took it to heart.

He is young, and scared, but he has to survive. There is more evil on this island than anywhere else in the world, and so he lets the monsters in, lets them sink in his flesh and teach his nose how to follow scents. 

He barely remembers the touch of other humans, a long-ago distant memory. There are many trophies on the wall but none of them will soothe his heart. When the adrenaline comes rushing in, bright and hot and gushing gold, he cannot still his feet. He feels his lips curl back from his teeth instinctively, a snarl that wells in his throat and demands to be heard. 

This island is not safe. Jake English does not think that the animals are the only reason anymore.

**vii. and what mysteries does this darkness hide?**

Roxy Lalonde is a creature of the night.

No light lives here anymore. She ate it whole, sunk her teeth into it and ripped it to shreds. What has the light ever done for her? Only shone on her flaws, all the places where she is imperfect, where her fingers grasp instinctively for a martini. 

The dark tastes like a shot of bourbon. She has grown to have a taste for it, for its smooth burning. She doesn't need light to burn. 

She doesn't think she has a body anymore. She is only the sinuous movement of the singing shadows, saying: come and hide in us. Hide all your dark secrets and your void, hide yourself from yourself and from your friends until you do not know who you used to be. 

In the dark, she does not need to see the endings of everything. In the dark, she can pretend that everything is okay.

**viii. what webs you've woven and caught yourself in**

Dirk Strider is not and never has been a good person.

He doesn't know how to make himself more than a puppet. On strings, the world dances a tango and he doesn't know how to stop it. There are many strings, and he cannot help his fingers from pulling at them.

He wanted to be safe. He wanted the others to be safe. He wanted to know and be in control, to have some measure of safety and a semblance of sanity, some damn peace of mind because there is so much he has to worry about-

Spiders dance across his face, grow webs around his body. Is he himself not a form of imprisonment, trapping his friends into staying by his side? He doesn't know if he's really a human being anymore. He doesn't trust himself to know.

Once, the emptiness of this lonely apartment felt like a prison he couldn't wait to get out of. Now, it feels like the only thing that keeps the world safe from being hurt by him. 

**ix. you were robbed of rebirth**

Once, Aradia Megido was happy.

She remembers it well. She used to have friends. It has been a long long time, but she remembers having friends and laughing and the bright, comforting steady thrum of her bloodpusher, her chest saying: you are alive, and you are alive, and you are alive. 

That is gone now.

She doesn't know when it started. Maybe it was dying, losing her body- maybe she wasn't meant to come back. Maybe it was a bug in the robot, an unfixed glitch- some kind of curse, a problem, something that could have been fixed. 

Whichever it was. She doesn't know.

She has a body, now. It was supposed to be hers. It was supposed to belong to her. But her soul is stained by death, touched by the Handmaid's red fingers. There were bound to be consequences.

Formaldehyde sits heavy and cloying in her hair. Her fingers and her toes are necrotic now. Sometimes, when she looks in the mirror, she doesn't have a face, just a grinning white skull. The first time she saw it, she screamed. These days, she's gotten used to it, which scares her.

She doesn't smile much these days. When she does, it is always empty.

**x. your body a prison without bars**

Before, Tavros Nitram loved animals.

They were kind to him. They touched his arms and soothed his tears and he loved them, he did; the only gentle things in the world that loved him, he thought. He was always careful, touching them, caring for them- making sure that they felt loved, that they felt the sheer amount of love he had for them.

He knew they could feel it- he could touch their minds, feel around the edges and see if they were happy. And they were happy.

But then they all died, and he could feel their fear as they did, and it changed him. Slowly, but still- the fear that touched his brain was in his blood now, crying out quietly. He grew afraid of sharp things, of the shine when light hit a blade, of the taste of meat. 

Now, he feels the fear always in the hummingbird-beat of his chest. His body has long-since been broken from a fall, but it twists itself grotesquely back together, and he tastes meat and it is good. It is not animal meat. 

He wants to fly, but birds in slaughterhouses have their wings clipped. 

**xi. you will always be someone else's home**

Sollux Captor was doomed from the start.

He had a destiny and it read _battery_ , and it looked like wires and blood and the end of his freedom. A column, and his body, and unimaginable pain, and never ever moving again. He can imagine it. He lived it, after all. 

Sollux Captor has never been much for destiny.

There is blood on his sleeve and twitching in his mouth. He opens his lips and out fly wasps. He peels a worm away from the shell of his ear, tastes the crunch of flies when he bites down with his teeth. Cockroaches skitter around his knees.

Bees buzz in his stomach, his throat, his lungs, his ears, his eyes. They make their hives in the open wounds that will never heal, the places where he tore out the wires with his bare hands and freed himself, lay their young and are born there. It should hurt. It only tickles. 

He was always going to be used by something, he tells himself. At least this way, he still has some measure of freedom.

**xii. there are broken bonds in your heart**

Karkat Vantas was going to be the whole world's savior.

He had a mark on his shirt and a death sentence on his head and in his blood ever since the day he slid, still wet, out of the eggsac and into the arms of a waiting cultist. They gave him a legacy and an ancestor that he could never begin to live up to, assigned him a lusus and they told him not to speak of the red song humming in the dark and warm places of his veins until it was time. 

He was a child, and he made a mistake. 

All he could do was hurt people, in the end. All that he was could hurt.

The others, they would be punished for harboring him. The penalty for treason and heresy was death, was torture, was the worst kind of ending, and he wanted nothing more than to protect his friends.

So he walked into the mist when it whispered to him, let the fog curl wet and cold around his shoulders, let it sink into the edges of his teeth and the curl of his hair. It didn't taste of anything except absence.

He doesn't know how to leave the mists. He doesn't know why he would want to.

**xiii. everything i've ever let go of has claw marks on it**

Nepeta Leijon does not remember who she was before.

These days, all she has is the hunt, the heady rush of blood and adrenaline in her veins, speaking of the things she can do to people. She can rip them apart; her claws are so so sharp and they are always very very easy to break. 

She stalks them, chases them down until they are exhausted and fall to pieces in front of her, and then she tears them apart. The arterial spray of blood tastes so good in her mouth, thick and salt-sweet. She licks the droplets off her mouth and stands, moves on to the next one.

Her body is no longer soft, but hard with muscles and claws and edges. Her eyes shine in the darkness- an indication. They see her coming, but it is never enough.

Sometimes, she gets flashes of old memory. Her mind gives her images- a girl with a bubbly laugh, a boy with strong but gentle hands and broken teeth. Laughing at bad jokes. A purr in her throat and the comfort of a body beneath her that she will always protect-

Then it is gone, and there is gore and viscera in her teeth, and still the chase-hunger yearning in her stomach; the yearning that will never be satisfied.

**xiv. does the light remember your name?**

Kanaya Maryam was destined for the breeding caverns. 

She was the sun's queen. She sat outside in the warmth of it and felt its harsh kindness on her open, upward tilted face, the kind of love only she could endure, and she loved it back just as well. It felt like home.

When they took her to the dark places, she found herself sobbing afterwards in the emptiness of the caves, holding her face in her hands for some kind of warmth, not even enough light t see her own tears.

The darkness swallowed her whole. Kanaya Maryam came out of the caverns changed.

Now her body is a dark hole where sunlight used to touch. She has turned into a silhouette, her outline full of jagged edges that bleed out hungry black tendrils, sucking the light out of every room. She sits in the shadows and longs for the light.

Kanaya is so hungry for the sun. 

**xv. i thought when bad things happen / there will be witnesses**

Terezi Pyrope was born for knowledge, for the subtle press of the lever and the wrench that reveals it. She was made bright and whip-smart, with a cane in her hand that would never falter. She was born to Know the truth.

She knows so much, these days. There were so many criminals, so many things she had to catch. There was a whole world she had to fix and she couldn't do it without the hoard of knowledge in her skull, tangy and turquoise and hers. They said it could help her.

Eyes dot her body- they run along her arms, along her legs, dot her torso and her back, adorn her cheekbones. They tell her things- in two years that one will commit treason and be caught and hung. Four days ago that one killed xir abusive moirail and now xe doesn't know what to do. That one, she has a patron of her own, and her suffering will taste sweet despite the way you deny your hungry watching.

Each of her eyes is a useless red, and she has so much that she Knows, and yet-

How can it be that she Knows so much and yet despite all of it she can't figure out how to be happy again?

**xvi. if we could light the room with pain, we'd be such a glorious fire**

Vriska Serket has been hurting her whole life.

There were so many kinds of hurt and she's felt so many of them. There is blood and bruises, there is her mother's voice whispering whispering in her head, there is guilt that sits in her breastbone and does not leave, there is the knowledge that she is entirely alone.

The only thing she knows how to do anymore is turn all her pain within and without until everyone has left her and the aching pain in her chest that will never leave her, it hurts like nothing she has ever known. 

The fire makes her into a beacon, a pyre, a sacrificial flame. It shines so bright, blue and hot and never-ending- the crackle of the fire murmurs in her ear and says that unlike everything else, it will never leave her. 

All she knows how to do is hurt. All she knows how to do is be hurt. She ruins people by touch, and it hurts to look at her. It hurts to touch her.

There is one thing the fire cannot do. She asks and asks, she turns it inward, but the fire burns and burns and yet it still cannot cauterize the open wound in her heart where Terezi used to be. 

**xvii. what rules are still in your reach?**

Equius Zahhak has always been strange.

He was sweat, and muscles, and broken teeth. He reeked of sweat and fermenting milk. His horn is broken off, the tip an open wound of exposed nerve that will never stop aching. Large, and wide, and slick with that thick wet sweat. 

The world used to make sense, and it doesn't anymore. 

His skin sloughs and bulks and hardens. His nails grow long, long and clawlike, as sharp as Nepeta's razor claws. His hair grows long and twists in strange, hypnotizing spiral patterns. People stare at him when he appears. 

There are many doors. They go many places. The tunnels are long and twisting and dizzying. There are colors, and spirals, and nothing makes sense anymore. He thinks he is slowly going insane.

He hates this. Why can't anything stay the same in his head anymore?

**xviii. corpses in motion**

Gamzee Makara has had Messiahs since his birth. He worships them in... unconventional ways.

In his ears the strains of a calliope organ sings him songs and tells him stories- the things he must do to reach his god. Skin is part of it. He shed his own a long time ago- the one he wears now is loose around his face and tight around his shoulders. It rips in places. Sopor is good for moisturizer. 

Blood coats his mouth, but it's not about the blood, it's about the unknowable. He likes the dark, the quiet, stepping half out of the alleyway, the way eyes try to make sense of his form and fail, the way they try to pin him down and never manage it. He is uncanny and unknown and no one will ever understand the truth of him.

The whole world makes too much sense. He remembers a sweeter haze- a boy with green around his mouth, an empty hive, waiting by the sea for someone who would never come home. He doesn't remember much of that time, but he wants to go back to it. 

The Church disavowed him a long time ago. His worship is heretical, but he doesn't care.

There is only one way to reach his god, and it's by wearing the Messiah's skin.

**xix. what does blood taste like in your mouth?**

Eridan Ampora was made for war.

There is cold violet in his veins, and it wants to be warm. He has a birthright, and it is violence, it is the sweet hot spray of rust-copper-golden in his mouth. He is not discerning in color. It all has its own individual taste, and he loves all of it.

There was an old war, he thinks. There was a burden. But what is a burden to a murderer? There is nothing left of his old life. 

Slaughter used to mean something, used to have purpose. But he has nothing anymore, no legacy to uphold, no future to protect- when he rips open someone's throat and drinks of the wet warmth of it, there is no aching in his heart for something more. The slaughter is all he needs.

He tells himself this. He thinks he will believe it someday.

**xx. there is less death and destruction than there is transmutation**

Feferi Peixes was never anything less than frightening.

Her gills drip with oil and with blood. Water squelches between her toes, hissing and foaming. Her hair crackles with the energy of an oncoming storm. In some places, her skin glows green or pink or purple, and to touch her is to incur enough radiation to drop dead.

As a child, she thought the world could be fixed. All the broken things were so obvious to her, the suffering screaming out to her like a beacon. She thought her touch could mend it. 

These days, all her touch does is kill. 

She knows better, now. The world is so fundamentally broken. There is nothing that they can do anymore; it can't be fixed. But it can be remade into something that isn't broken through fire and blood and the sweet, heady scent of nuclear destruction. 

Where she walks, the ground shrivels up and dies and stinks of radiation, and soon she will have walked the whole world over; and then, then she can watch the world be remade.

Isn't it lovely?

**Author's Note:**

> :) i hope you enjoyed! i hope i made it clear who was being possessed by which entities, but if you want a list just ask in the comments and i'll give you the rundown.


End file.
